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Michael C. Carlos Museum

Michael C. Carlos Museum

Even the best sites need to be upgraded over time. Mediacurrent initially built the Emory Michael C. Carlos Museum in Drupal 5. Over time we’ve done maintenance releases and feature enhancements for Carlos, but software as well as websites have a limited lifetime. As 2012 rolled around we noticed that most of the 5.x modules had reached their end of life and certainly no new 5.x modules were being created. The lack of updated and new modules severely limited what new feature sets Emory could incorporate into their site.

WHY DRUPAL?

Using Drupal best practices, develop the site to ensure a long lifetime

Create an open architecture that allows the site to grow as the museum does

Project Kick-off

Part of our responsibility as Drupal developers is to keep our clients advised of the latest and greatest solutions, as well as, advising when we think is the optimal time to upgrade. We spoke with Emory and determined that it was time to upgrade their website. This time we did something different; since it was such a large leap from Drupal 5 to Drupal 7 we decided to start with a fresh install of Drupal 7.

Freed from the confinements of upgrading from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, we rebuilt the site from scratch using new modules and modern theming techniques. We did base the look and feel of the new site off of the old site. In fact, we had to look at the source code when we updated production to make sure that it was in fact running Drupal 7.

Theming

Our goals in theming the site were to minimize the styling and template work. At the same time, we wanted to maximize the flexibility for future needs, including changes in width for higher resolution support as well as mobile support. To this end, the Omega theme was used with the HTML5 starter kit.

We successfully reproduced the old site’s presentation with only two minor differences:

The site’s width was slightly reduced so the default 960 grid could be used.

There were several cases where images were displayed f lush with the left side of the content area.

During theming, it became apparent that the width of the left column needed to be increased to better accommodate the reduced page width. Due to Omega’s ability to alter column widths within its settings, this issue was resolved in a matter of minutes without any CSS work whatsoever.

Featured Modules

Views: This module was used throughout the site for: section content lists, the front page image rotator, and the front page items.

JCarousel: As the previous site used Flash for its slider, it was decided this HTML-based approach would be used due to general flexibility, views integration, and better mobile support.

Context:Block placement was done strictly with Context. During develop- ment, this made it possible to provide section-specific menus and header images without any code or theme-based solutions. During QA and post- launch, several one-off pages which required unique menus were needed and Context allowed them to be added via configuration changes alone.

Final Thoughts

Our overall goal in this project was to create a site that was familiar to the end user as well as easy to maintain for administra- tors. Leveraging Drupal 7, as well as community created modules, allowed Mediacurrent to deliver a fully upgraded site within a short timeframe.

Customer quote

I would like to personally thank Mediacurrent for a job well done. We have been working with Mediacurrent on a vast array of projects for several years and they have consistently performed with top notch professionalism, attention to detail, and the often under appreciated friendly attitude. Our collaboration with them on the Carlos Museum website was no exception. Mediacurrent went the extra mile to make sure the Drupal integration into the approved design worked flawlessly. I never hesitate to recommend Mediacurrent’s services and we look forward to future collaborations.